Trouble Restarting Windows

[Guest]

I have a Sony Vaio and have had no problems with it until yesterday. When
performing a typical restart I received an error page that Windows was unable
to load and that it may be due to recent hardware or software changes (there
are none that I can think of). I chose to restart normally and it worked
fine. After that I performed numerous virus and malware checks, along with a
run through Norton's WinDoctor and Disk Doctor. No problems were found. I
tried restarting and the same problem occurred again. Basically it restarts
normally, but in the middle of the Windows XP logo it restarts the process
and I get the error page. This time I wasn't able to log-in normally, but
was able to using "the last successful restart." I decided to shut down my
computer for a while at that point. When starting it up again several hours
later I was unable to restart through any means...I eventually did get lucky
on about the 20th try using one of the Safe Mode Options (standard Safe Mode
continually froze before restarting). Once Windows is running everything
seems fine, but I'm now fearful of ever turning my computer off again.

I've almost settled for the fact that I'll have to perform a system restore,
but I'd prefer to avoid that if at all possible. I really have no clue how
to diagnose this problem as it started out of the blue yesterday and has
seemingly worsened over the last 24 hours. No error messages are given other
than the possible hardware or software changes I mentioned above (and haven't
occurred), or a power failure or interruption during restart (never
happened). Even "the last successful restart" wouldn't work the most recent
time, nor standard Safe Mode. Any suggestions or comments would be
appreciated.

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

Open a command prompt to run:

chkdsk /r

You could have some file corruption error on the disk.

 

[Guest]

I did as you said and the system restarted successfully, however, upon
another restart the same problem occurred. I tried restarting again with the
last good configuration and was unsuccessful. I decided to disable automatic
restart, tried again, and received the following in short:

"Windows was not restarted to prevent damage to your system.

BAD_POOL_CALLER

Check all Hardware and Software. Disable BIOS memory options such as
caching or shadowing. Run in Safe Mode if necessary.

Technical Information:

***STOP: 0x000000C2 (0x00000007,0x00000CD4,0x02040001,0x8301CA68)"

I then shutdown the computer, turned it back on, and had a successful
restart. If it's of any help, until this point I'd only been able to
successfully restart the computer in "Directory Services Restore Mode." I
was unsuccessful with every other restart option.

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

My guess would be a failing hard drive

 

[Guest]

I certainly hope not, the computer is only a year old.